


Amalgamate

by Aradellia



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Book XV Spoilers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, cause this update snatched my wig clean off, light gore, tbh I just wanted to write about what could have happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-29 04:09:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15721692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aradellia/pseuds/Aradellia
Summary: Two existences forced to be bound into one, tied together by a single piece of another's heart. Two intersecting deals turns into a mess of uncountable consequences. The Devil sneers upon the creation before him, protecting it within a black claw cage. His touch is... gentle, as he touches the smoky experiment, watching it swirl into infinity."My greatest creation... show me your pitch black soul."





	Amalgamate

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers ahead for the most recent update!
> 
> kisses fingers. this is to those who predicted the shared body/existence between our apprentice and lucio, and to the weird few of you who just want more Devil content cause I see you.

"I want a new body! There's no reason for me to suffer like this anymore."

"GIVE HER BACK TO ME! I'll do anything, give anything. She didn't deserve this!"

Such curious requests of you two.

Perhaps this could be...entertaining after all.

* * *

 Try again.

The grotesque mass at his feet gave a guttural noise. Perhaps it would have been a growl if it had formed its vocal cords properly. A hand slams into the dirt, its six fingers flexing in the wrong direction in an obvious attempt to show an emotion. The Devil guessed it to be anger, but from which one he didn't know, nor did he care. It whined for a moment before it gargled a cry of pain, blood splattering around it as if it were spraying it like a water fountain. It dissipated into its smoky, unformed visage once more. In curled into itself slowly, settling back into itself as it spun in its own infinity. The glowing center of it, the catalyst for this thing's survival beat slow and steady as a heart should.

He watched it curiously, as much as any creator would gaze upon its creation. He was amazed by the progress it had made in conjuring its body, or its approximation of a body. It could form a body, yes, but many things were missing, misplaced, deformed, or otherwise grotesquely contorted until broken shapes. He could sense the constant struggle within the smoke, the two souls fighting for dominance over eachother's existence. Both were already exhausted and drained of much of their power, though it was slowly leaning into one of their favors.

Come now, try one more time for me.

I believe this time, you will be more successful.

_"Success...ful?"_

It was the first intelligent answer he had gotten out of it, though he was slightly disappointed at the dissonant tone of the word, the fighting for control continuing. The spiraling sphere of smoke and magic seemed to turn toward him as he rounded it. It began to undulate once again, spiraling into shapes and such, looking for its next form. He paused his walk around them, watching with a growing smile as it soon spread itself out on the floor, masking itself in a smokescreen as it formed its next try at a full body.

A gold metal hand reached out of the smoke, clawing at the ground.

The Devil's smile disappeared in an instant.

The veins of the arm flickered violently between red and white, pulling what had formed out of the smoke. White and soft brown skin mixed into an awful patchy checkerboard pattern spotted the spots the gold arm hadn't formed. The other arm was all but broken, hanging limply again the ground in a combination of ripped open muscles and way too many bones. The face was half formed, leaving bloody muscle bare to the world. One eye had fused into the other, creating a horrendous double eye on the left side of its head, while the additional third eye was perfectly formed, watching him with a half-lidded blankness. Its back was broken, curled the wrong way, leaving it leaning over malformed hips, and legs without skin. Pulsating lines crossed over its broken torso, flashing just as violently as its golden arm. It opened its mouth to speak, revealing a half formed tongue and a mouthful of blood.

No words came out. Only a disgusting sequence of a cough and a choke, spraying black-red blood over the Devil's feet. It tried to close its mouth again, only to have a sickening snapping sound ring out. The poor thing had broken its half formed jaw, leaving it to dangle open. Rows of teeth, both flat and sharp, revealed itself out of the gory pink and red of its mouth, not in any order but instead spotted in random places in the soft flesh surrounded what little of a tongue it had.

It watched the Devil as he approached, reaching out his hand to gently stroke the misshapen head of the amalgamation. Wisps of blond and bright red hair sway under the Devil's touch.

Try again. You're getting closer now.

It wilted at his disapproval, lowering its head and closing its eyes, tears of blood slipping down its ghostly white cheeks. It reached up to touch him with the gold hand, and the Devil allowed the touch. It was cautious and worried, wrapping around the Devil's wrist like a whisper of silk over his fur. He found himself enjoying the touch, proud of the progress. It wasn't a moment later that it dug the claws into his wrist. It gave a horrendous gargled growl at him, and in an instant, the Devil had put space between them.

It tilted its head unnaturally too far to the right before it bled away back into the smoke, returning to its ever swirling vortex.

Time worked very differently here, but the Devil almost worried that it would take too long for the inevitable to happen.

It took much longer this time for his creation to notice him again, focusing its movements to follow his, stilling the glowing 'heart' it had perfectly in the center of its whirlwind mass. He pauses in his pace, watching it pause with him. There was more focus this time, more... curiosity in it. He titled his head in his own curiosity, watching the condensed spiral of smoke turn ever so slightly with him. There was no hostility in its movements, only caution, curiosity, perhaps even fear. It slowly unwound itself, spread out onto the ground once more in a plume of its own miasma, not unlike a flower opening its petals to the sun.

The confliction that had surrounded it had dissipated, the Devil realized. He knelt down, watching the smoke swirl around and around, forming hazy shapes within it.

He offers his hands out to his creation- no, not his creation from here on out.

Hazy hands reach out for his own, taking hold of his clawed hands as the haze parts away to reveal flawless honey brown skin. The haze parts more, revealing more of her skin, the sunset red and orange of her hair as it floats around her head. Slowly, white light marks her face, the light tracing down her neck and down her shoulders, criss-crossing around her arms and down to her wrists. It flows down her stomach and hips, leaving lines that shimmer like diamonds. Her back glows the brightest, the sigil placed there reactivating once more.

Her eyes were the last thing he got to see form. She opened them slowly, hesitantly, and for a moment the Devil was fearful that it had failed such as they had gotten so close. Her irises were the grey of the Count's, but only for a moment. She blinked three times, and with each one, the color of her eyes changed. The first blink made turned them empty and cold, a blend of grey and purple, the sclera turned red. The second blink washed away the red of her whites, leaving a more focused iris, the haze of grey and purple remaining. With the third, the grey was washed away, leaving only alert purple which looked up at him with almost childish awe.

The awe disappeared into recognition, and from recognition to solemn.

The Devil grinned softly at her, worried that he would frighten her.

You've done well, Vale.

"The Devil..." she whispers his name, voice weak from months of struggling to breathe, of the loss of it entirely. It would take time to get it back to full strength.

You recognize me so easily.

She seemed hesitant to respond to him. Her hair settled upon her naked shoulders, looking around her at the blank surroundings. The Devil took precautions for his creation, surrounding them in an isolated bubble of space within his own realm, protecting them from the true nature of his realm. Settled with her examination of the blank space, she returned her eyes to him. He gently squeezed her hands, careful of his claws around such easily broken skin. She didn't seem to mind the gesture.

"How could I not recognize you?"

Considering circumstances, I believed you would not remember anything.

She closes her eyes to take a breath, her aura rippling around her as her magic slowly returns to her. Perhaps he had miscalculated what would happen if he brought her back alongside the Count. She squeezes his claws softly, looking down at them as deft fingers trace along the black and white colors on his palms.

"Magic lives on, even after death."

You are far from magical.

Her laughter seems misplaced by his standards, but perhaps it humored her in an odd way. She looks up at him once more, watching his face with an expression he couldn't quite pin. It was somewhere between bemused and interested.

She looked back down at her hands, and his around hers, curiously running her thumbs over two of his claws.

"I have enough magic to take me to places like this."

Oh?

"Burning alive wasn't as bad as I thought it to be. I woke up to a beautiful green field, feeling rejuvenated. I was told I had done all I could, with all my strength.

Ah, so it was true after all. You're connected to the faceless Fool after all.

Sometime akin to pride comes forward in her face, a smile curling her lips. She seemed happy knowing that after all she had done in the human realm, fighting for a cure to something beyond her understanding despite her close touch with the truth, and becoming an imaginary goddess to a group of fools drunk on magic at such a young age, she was welcomed into the realm of her most trusted major arcana.

She cleared her throat, her voice stronger now. She scooted back from him, taking her hands with her, sitting cross-legged in front of him, as if readying to speak to him so casually.

"You knew. Don't fake surprise for something you could have easily seen."

 ~~~~ There were moments I believed you far from the likes of the Fool, Vale.

Her smile drops for a moment, a serious expression on her face. Perhaps she remembered the years of pain and terror, of becoming something akin to a monster before finding peace and settling away from the horrors in the south. She had been quite the terror, it seems, in her younger years, stolen from her family and left without a proper magical teacher.

"I believed the same for a long time, lost in the thralls of my magic."

There's no need to think on such things anymore, Valacia.

He slowly takes hold of her hands again, watching the light in her eyes drain away as he pulls her to her feet. Her aura shimmers, disturbed by his meddling, but it opens for him like an unlocked door. These memories, every last one of them for so many years back, they were useless to her now. In the aftermath of the plague, in the results of her devastatingly quiet death and of the voices that rose up after her ashes were scattered like common earth, what she was before coming to Vesuvia meant nothing. Her time trapped within the walls of a church hiding a cult that worshiped a fiery goddess, her time there ending in burning down the entire convent with everyone inside meant nothing. Her time adventuring after the convent burning, developing magic so powerful and learning to fight like a mercenary meant nothing.

Her existence as the singular Valacia Carnet meant nothing now.

Bound to a piece of the water magician's, Asra's, heart and soul, both she and Count Lucio meant nothing as separate people.

They would be forever bound to the single thing keeping them alive, keeping them existing in the mortal plane. No longer could they act as autonomous people. One could not exist without the other. Only one could exist physically at a time, never both. In the end of the world, well all falls away and it leaves their realms crossed, the two immortals bound by a shared existence would dance into infinity, a neverending dance of fiery disaster and fruitless existence.

Forgot now your life.

For you are no longer yourself, dear magician.

From here until the death of the universe, you are bound by something far stronger then you.

Your previous life means nothing.

Your previous loves mean nothing.

Valacia Carnet is dead.

Count Lucio of Vesuvia is dead.

You are nothing more then her shell, given new life by a kindhearted soul.

A misguided man who knows not the weight of his actions in such desperation.

Rest now, young woman, for you are reborn.

An experiment to live forever.

An existence tied to anothers.

May your shared existences live.

Be it happily, or sadly.

It matters not to me.

* * *

Light comes out of the dark around her, as if pulled toward the surface of the water she found herself drawing further and further down into. Frantic words and voices surrounded her hazy head, leaving her dizzy with life she had none of. Limbs that shouldn't exist twitched to life, fingers clawing at unseen and unknown ground, settling in her horrified confusion. Another voice broke into the darkness, muffled by the inky black of her current existence. Slowly, the light reached out in the far corners of her vision, rippling across the surface of her being like stones against the water, leaving visible trails across its surface.

Her eyes opened to the sight of the starry night sky, whatever it was. They twinkled above her, teasingly, beautifully, until she couldn't make out what they were. A voice was speaking to her, gripping shoulders she didn't know she had until now.

"...a..."

A? What a weird thing.

Her vision flickered, her eyes tired, but they stayed open after a few tries to keep them open. This time, her view of the stars and the sky were obscured by a face. A face with no name, with no connection to her. She blinked away, realizing the face was crying on her, tears openly falling down beet red cheeks. Another blink, slowly this time, revealed that the face had hair, and eyes, and an expression that confused her more.

"Y-you're alive... you're really alive-"

The person chanted that phrase again and again. She opened her mouth, another thing she didn't know she had, to do something, but nothing came out. The person's expression changed, but ti still held this odd twinkle of happiness and hope. They disappeared for a moment before reappearing.

"Don't speak, it's okay... I'm so happy you're alive." he sobbed, something coming to her newly forming thoughts as he spoke.

**Who was this man, and why did he care that she was alive?**


End file.
